Architecture and Armed Conflict

The Politics of Destruction

JoAnne Mancini, Keith Bresnahan, JoAnne Mancini, Keith Bresnahan

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781317659761
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Arquitectura
• Subtopic: Arquitectura general

Architecture and Armed Conflict is the first multi-authored scholarly book to address this theme from a comparative, interdisciplinary perspective. By bringing together specialists from a range of relevant fields, and with knowledge of case studies across time and space, it provides the first synthetic body of research on the complex, multifaceted subject of architectural destruction in the context of conflict.

The book addresses several specific research questions:

• How has the destruction of buildings and landscapes figured in recent historical conflicts, and how have people and states responded to it?

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• How has the destruction of architecture been represented in different historical periods, and to what ends?

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• What are the relationships between the destruction of architecture and the destruction of art, particularly iconoclasm?

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• If architectural destruction is a salient feature of many armed conflicts, how does it feature in post-conflict environments?

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• What are the relationships between architectural destruction and processes of restoration, recreation or replacement?

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Considering multiple conflicts, multiple time periods, and multiple locations allows this international cohort of authors to provide an essential primer for this crucial topic.

PART I

Architectural destruction in contemporary conflicts

1

ARCHITECTURE AND DWELLING IN THE ‘WAR OF DESTRUCTION’ IN VIETNAM

Christina Schwenkel

To be sure, we may well be inclined to ascribe this peacefulness to another motif: the character of the ruin as past. It is the site of life from which life has departed—but this is nothing merely negative, added to it only by thought, as it is for the countless things which, once immersed in life and accidentally cast on its bank, are by their very nature capable of being easily caught again by its current.

Georg Simmel, The Ruin¹

On 20 January 2013, Tom Hayden, a former State Senator of California and prominent anti-Vietnam War activist, published an editorial in the Los Angeles Times entitled ‘Buried History in Hanoi’.² The occasion was the approaching fortieth anniversary of the Paris Peace Accords that ended the involvement of the United States in the war in Vietnam. Hayden remarked on the flurry of media attention that the anniversary would likely attract, while only weeks before there had been scant coverage in the United States of the fortieth anniversary of the infamous ‘Christmas bombing’ of Hanoi and Hải Phòng.³ Hayden had just returned from Vietnam, and he opened the essay with a description of a bomb shelter in the garden of the renovated, upscale Metropole Hotel that is now open to the public for tours. An historical marker in the ventilated, forty square-meter bunker informs the visitor that Jane Fonda (Hayden’s ex-wife) had once taken refuge there, as had the folk-singer Joan Baez, during the fierce air attacks in December 1972.

If Hayden’s media intervention sought to remind readers of a now largely-forgotten chapter of US atrocities in Vietnam, in this chapter I exhume another buried history of US aerial bombing in Vietnam: that of the demolished city of Vinh, provincial capital of Ngh

An. Between 1964 and 1973, the United States carried out sustained air attacks across the Democratic Republic of Vietnam (DRV), colloquially referred to in the West as ‘North Vietnam’. While the Vietnamese named the protracted air strikes America’s ‘War of Destruction’—Chi

n tranh Phá hoại—Americans called them by their code names: ‘Operation Rolling Thunder’ (1965–1968) or ‘Operation Linebacker I and II’ (1972), alongside which we can place an un-named but continuing campaign of indiscriminate bombing. Hayden’s claim that the history of the bombing has been largely forgotten in the United States is not entirely accurate, given that it was never widely remembered—nor the loss of Vietnamese life commemorated—by the American public. The average US citizen knows little about the extent of the casualties and devastation of the air war. Rather, US public memory of the ‘strategic bombing’ has instead centered on other losses: failed policy, downed aircraft, and captured, killed, or missing-in-action (MIA) pilots. Hayden’s editorial, however, shows that in the rare instances when the air strikes and their consequences are remembered, this counter-memory focuses almost entirely on Hanoi, neglecting the destruction of smaller provincial cities and rural areas. The fierce B-52 Christmas attack on Hanoi, with its high rate of civilian casualties (estimated at 1,600, according to Hayden), a demolished Bạch Mai hospital, and the flattened residential area of Khâm Thiên, has come to symbolize the apex of US aerial violence in the war.

There is a practical reason that accounts written by Hayden, Sontag, and other American visitors to the DRV gave priority to Hanoi and its immediate surroundings: westerners who visited the north in wartime were not usually inclined, or even allowed by Vietnamese security, to venture any further due to logistical problems (damaged roads, downed bridges) and concerns for safety (continuous aerial attacks)—Fonda being an exception.⁴ Such obstacles, however, did not prohibit allies from socialist countries such as the USSR and East Germany from taking great risks to visit the targeted ‘panhandle’ cities of Nam Đ

nh, Thanh Hoá and Vinh, requiring days of slow travel under the cover of night. These journalists, filmmakers, engineers, and other experts left a rich visual and literary record of the air war and its devastation that is unfamiliar to most westerners, but which circulated widely in socialist media at the time.⁵ In this chapter, I draw upon these resources, as well as ethnographic interviews conducted in Vinh City in 2010–11, to examine air power as a force of urban mass destruction and productivity, in this case, generative of new architectural forms, modes of dwelling, and techniques of urban planning.

In what follows, I draw upon Hayden’s editorial to introduce and develop three key thematics: 1) ruination and regeneration, what Simmel observed to be the uncanny lifelessness of a ruin and yet its capacity for reanimation; thus, the colonial Metropole Hotel amidst a landscape of urban devastation and its upscale renovation many years later; 2) the state of ‘in-betweenness’, by which I mean the liminal period after destruction before reconstruction could begin—indeed, before the air attacks even ended in Vietnam; and 3) the modes of habitation corresponding to this intermediary state, which I refer to as ‘liminal dwelling’, signified in Hayden’s piece by the underground bunker in which people lingered for long periods of time to escape the bombing. As the air raids intensified, whole villages moved underground, and entire cities were evacuated to the mountains and countryside where public institutions, such as schools and clinics, were rebuilt. I argue that these built forms, some of which, like the bunker, continue to exist as tourist destinations today, came to constitute a distinct architecture of dwelling in war.

As an anthropologist, I approach architecture as a cultural and material practice that mediates power relations and social identities, and consider the built environment in all its forms—regardless of aesthetics, technology, or longevity.⁶ In so doing, I adopt Tim Ingold’s notion of a ‘dwelling perspective’ to examine the spatial and temporal dynamics of a landscape transformed by war, as well as by actors involved in its (trans)formation and habitation.⁷ For Ingold, the landscape ‘tells—or rather is—a story’ that unfolds with the passing of time,⁸ suggesting a rapprochement between humans and the environment as memories come to inhabit the landscape. To perceive this memoryscape and examine its traces, as I attempt to do here, is to partake in what Ingold identified as an archaeological act that unburies the past to reveal—like Simmel’s ‘ruin’—the living memory of a past life embodied in its topography.

Ruination: demise of a Vietnamese city

In the morning we saw Vinh, or rather what remained of this ancient city. This very important industrial center, which had about 60,000 citizens, is in ruins. Yet almost every day the news bulletins report new bombings in Vinh. The bombs now fall on the rocks, even the ruins do not remain.

Under the Skies of Vietnam, 1968⁹

There was much ambivalence in the US government about the efficacy of ‘Operation Rolling Thunder’, the air campaign carried out from March 1965–November 1968. An assessment of the bombing by the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) in February 1968 estimated its economic and military damage to the DRV at approximately USD 430 million. The bombing had effectively disrupted targeted lines of communication—roads, railways, and ports–and the capability of the DRV to infiltrate and carry out sustained military operations in the Republic of Vietnam (RVN) to the south.¹⁰ However, an increase in foreign aid and imports of weapons, ammunition, and vehicles to the DRV following the cessation of bombing, in addition to a large labor force that promptly set about repairing devastated infrastructure and industry, meant that this capability was, on the contrary, mounting. A study conducted by the US Senate Committee on Foreign Relations in October of the same year confirmed that the air war had failed to achieve its goals, chief of which had been to interdict the flow of troops and supplies into the RVN. According to the study’s authors, the DRV proved to be a ‘poor target’ for air attacks. As an agricultural nation with rudimentary transportation and little modern industry, according to a Pentagon analyst cited in the study, it had been ‘far less susceptible to the strategic effects of bombing’ than anticipated. Ostensibly, the logic of strategic air power used against the DRV had been based on a model of highly industrialized countries, rather than those with subsistence economies, like Vietnam, with its population of ‘rice farmers who worked the land with water buffaloes and hand tools’. The failure of the air campaign, the study concluded, was thus attributable to, among other factors, the ‘underdeveloped nature’ of the DRV that provided ‘few valuable targets for bombing’.¹¹

On the ground, a conflicting view of the material, environmental, cultural, and economic effects of the air strikes emerged, as described by the Russian visitor to Vinh City who wrote ‘Under the Skies of Vietnam’: the complete razing of an historical city. Located along Highway 1A, halfway between Hanoi and the DMZ (the temporary border with the RVN), the city of Vinh occupied a strategic node in a complex transportation network that facilitated the continuous flow of troops and supplies to the southern battlefields via highway, rail, ship, and a series of small roads that wound their way through the jungles of Laos, referred to by the US military as the ‘Ho Chi Minh Trail’. As an important port city and center of industry, Vinh had been the target of repeated carpet-bombing. Between August 1964 and January 1973, the city was subjected to more than 4,700 air strikes, during which an estimated 250,555 tons of ordnance were dropped.¹² Bombers pummeled the city, requiring its evacuation except for defense forces and essential personnel. Production facilities and government agencies were likewise decentralized, split up, and dispersed to the countryside. Like in other Vietnamese cities, the effect on Vinh was a decade of ‘zero urban growth’.¹³ After the bombing subsided, few architectural structures were left standing on the cratered landscape. In recent interviews, older residents described their leveled city to me as ‘completely ravaged’ (tàn phá n

ng n

), and ‘devastated’ (tan hoang), the streets reduced to ‘piles of rubble and ash’ (đ

ng gạch đ

nát và trò tan). They remembered th...